Abstract
Learning to associate sensory stimuli with a chosen action involves a dynamic interplay between cortical and thalamic circuits. While the cortex has been widely studied in this respect, how the thalamus encodes learning-related information is still largely unknown. We studied learning-related activity in the medial geniculate body (MGB; Auditory thalamus), targeting mainly the dorsal and medial regions. Using fiber photometry, we continuously imaged population calcium dynamics as mice learned a go/no-go auditory discrimination task. The MGB was tuned to frequency and responded to cognitive features like the choice of the mouse within several hundred milliseconds. Encoding of choice in the MGB increased with learning, and was highly correlated with the learning curves of the mice. MGB also encoded motor parameters of the mouse during the task. These results provide evidence that the MGB encodes task- motor- and learning-related information.
Highlights
Learning, the process of acquiring new knowledge through experience, is known to involve disparate brain areas, and the cortex
We focused on the medial geniculate body (MGB; auditory thalamus), asking whether and how it represents sensory and cognitive information along learning
We found that 1) Stim-area under the curve (AUC) was significantly higher than choice-AUC early in the trial (p
Summary
The process of acquiring new knowledge through experience, is known to involve disparate brain areas, and the cortex. Learning to discriminate between different sensory stimuli leads to changes in the respective primary sensory areas (Blake et al, 2002; Chen et al, 2015; Driscoll et al, 2017; Gilad and Helmchen, 2020; Jurjut et al, 2017; Komiyama et al, 2010; Li et al, 2008; Makino and Komiyama, 2015; Poort et al, 2015; Yan et al, 2014). In other cases, decreased responsiveness to the learned stimuli have been measured These changes, too, may result in improvement in the discrimination of the stimuli (Christensen et al, 2019; Maor et al, 2020)
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